U.S. Pat. No. 6,792,545, assigned to the Assignee of the present application, discloses a system and method for performing secure investigations of networked devices over a computer network. Such an online investigation generally entails acquiring dynamic and/or static data stored in a target device being investigated. It is quite possible, however, that a connection with the device may be lost before the investigation is over. Although mechanisms exist for automatically reconnecting to the device upon such a loss of connection, the restarting of the acquisition is a manual process. Furthermore, in the prior art, the acquisition is resumed from the beginning of a device that was being acquired regardless of how far the system was in the acquisition process when the connection was lost. This may cause portions of the device already processed prior to the loss of connection to be reprocessed when the reconnection is made.
Accordingly, what is desired is a system and method in a computer investigations system for not only automatically reconnecting to a target device, but also automatically restarting any acquisition, previously in progress, of data stored in the device while minimizing the reprocessing of the data when a reconnection is made.